The Black Chicago Renaissance by Darlene Clark Hine

Author:Darlene Clark Hine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2012-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

One aspect of any renaissance is experimentation against a background of tradition.

—CHINWEIZU, Africa and the Rest of Us

Either it [Negro writing] crept in through the kitchen in the form of jokes; or it was the fruit of the foul soil which was the result of a liaison between inferiority-complexed Negro “geniuses” and burnt-out white Bohemians with money.

—RICHARD WRIGHT, “Blueprint for Negro Writing”

Chapter 6

Richard Wright and the Season of Manifestoes

JOHN McCLUSKEY JR.

Richard Wright’s ten years in Chicago (1927–37), before the publication of Native Son and the completion of his full autobiography, American Hunger, were years of dazzling challenges and growth. He found work in the post office after a bout of gorging; he joined the Federal Writers’ Project and shrank smartly and swiftly from the open blade of a confused actor. He started composing blues and haiku poetry. He befriended eminent sociologists at the University of Chicago. He joined the John Reed Club, later the Communist Party, and helped launch the South Side Writers’ Group. He crafted his first short stories. These experiences culminated in the development of his novels, Native Son and Lawd Today, as well as the story collection Uncle Tom’s Children. The lessons from these encounters resonate also through his nonfiction, such as 12 Million Black Voices and early essays. This essay explores the early journalistic writings, primarily through the Daily Worker, and the culmination of the diverse Chicago influences to his 1937 manifesto, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” The essay will also place Wright’s essay into an ever-widening circle of contemporaneous black diaspora manifestos struggling with issues of color, caste, and nationalism.

Often, the lead article or essay in an early, if not the first, issue of a small journal, the manifestoes were typically direct assaults on preceding traditions. The earlier traditions were the result of disruptions—colonialism in the cases of Caribbean and African nations—and literary expressions regarded as inauthentic. A new direction promised a bold return to a purer expression, a core from which new literary expressions reflect a more assertive group ethos. Such statements were often sweeping literary and cultural declarations of independence. They have served as urgent and crafted assertions of shifts in aesthetics and ethics. The new would be built upon a recovery and extension of the old. For some, it took the shape of experimentations against the traditional rhythms of music, as in the work of Nicolas Guillen utilizing the rhythms of the Cuban son or Sterling Brown’s use of classic blues. For others, it might have meant the locating within a folk tradition the heroic gestures and rhetoric of primary characters, as in the case of Jacque Roumain in Masters of the Dew. Further, it was a set of assertions of a nationalist spirit and an imagined past, as with the Negritude poets. In most statements, whether for ideological or strategic reasons, the call was to end provinciality and to align themselves with other writers/thinkers, regardless of color, who wished to join in common cause against the forces of injustice. Thus, the stance

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